Connecting Concepts to Problem-solving Documents

Main Document

Traditional quantitative problems of the type commonly found at the end of chapters in physics textbooks are assigned to students most introductory physics courses. Many students use a formula-driven approach to solve these problems that does not rely on understanding underlying physics concepts and that does little to encourage the problem-solving skills employed by experts. In another paper presented at this conference, we gave an example from electric circuits to illustrate the use of "bridging exercises" as part of students' homework to encourage students to solve problems by starting with developed physics concepts and models.1 In this paper, we describe our attempts to use the same approach in the context of electrostatics.